Chisapani and Nagarkot, the Kathmandu Valley Rim

This is one of the few treks we sell where no internal flight is involved, which removes the single largest cause of ruined itineraries in Nepal. You arrive at Tribhuvan, we collect you, and two mornings later a car takes you to the trailhead. If a monsoon cloud sits over the hills there is no aeroplane waiting to be cancelled, only a walk that gets wetter.

About 15 km north-east of the city centre, and an hour in the car if the Chabahil traffic behaves, ninety minutes if it does not. We leave the hotel at eight after breakfast. The road ends at a small hydroelectric intake and a knot of tea shops, and the concrete steps start immediately beside a large water pipe that feeds Kathmandu.

Changunarayan is about 20 km from central Kathmandu and Bhaktapur a few kilometres further. Allow an hour and a half in the late afternoon. If you have an evening flight out on day 4 rather than day 5, say so and we will finish at Changunarayan and go straight to the airport instead, with your bags already in the car.

Arrive a full day before the walk starts if you can. It costs you one hotel night and buys you a buffer against a delayed connection, and it means your first morning in Nepal is not also your first morning of walking. Flights into Kathmandu land at all hours, and we meet every one of them.

One government-licensed guide with a current first aid certificate leads every departure, from a single walker upwards. On groups of nine or more a second guide joins so that nobody at the back of the line is on their own. Most of our valley guides grew up in the hills you are walking through and know which tea shop has the good dal bhat.

Not route finding. The path is obvious and signposted for most of its length, and plenty of people walk it alone. A guide is for the park permit, the bed at Chisapani in October, the name of the peak you are pointing at, and the conversation with a farmer you would otherwise walk straight past.

Our guides are on a salary with insurance, not a day rate that stops when you go home, and their food and lodging on the trail are our cost, not theirs. Tips are welcome and never expected, and anything you give goes to the person you give it to.

English on every departure. We can usually put a French, German, Spanish or Japanese speaking guide on this route with three weeks' notice, and a Nepali sign language interpreter with more. Ask early rather than late, since the valley guides who do this are few.

Shivapuri Nagarjun is a national park with 159 square kilometres of forest that supplies a large part of Kathmandu's drinking water, and it has no rubbish collection above the gate. Your guide carries a bag and everything the group generates comes back down in it. That includes the fruit peel, which takes months to rot at this height and teaches monkeys bad habits.

Both lodges give you boiled or filtered water at no charge and your guide carries a filter as well. A three-day walk on bottled water means about nine plastic bottles per person, thrown away in a watershed. Bring a bottle you like and fill it up.

We use the same family lodge at Chisapani every time rather than whichever is cheapest that month, and lunch is always bought at a village tea shop rather than carried from the city. The park fee itself goes to the Department of National Parks and part of it back to the buffer zone communities on the trail.

It is a living Hindu temple before it is a heritage site, with worship going on while you photograph it. Leather belts and bags are sometimes asked to be left outside, shoes always. Non-Hindus may look at the courtyard but not enter the inner shrine, and nobody will explain that unless you ask, so we do.

Write to us or send a WhatsApp message with a rough week in mind. You will get a reply from somebody in our Kathmandu office who has walked this ridge, not a form letter. Nothing is owed at that point and nothing is owed until you choose to pay a deposit.

A passport scan, your arrival and departure flights, any medical conditions or dietary needs, and your rough walking experience. That is the whole list. There is no altitude questionnaire for this trek because there is no altitude.

A 20 per cent deposit holds your dates and the balance is due on the day you arrive in Kathmandu, in cash or by card at our office. Card payments carry the bank's own charge, which we will tell you before you use one rather than after.

We can put this trek together in two days if the lodges have space, and outside October and Easter they usually do. Plenty of people book it from a Thamel guesthouse on a Tuesday and are at Sundarijal on the Thursday. Ask, even if your dates are next week.

Cancel more than 21 days out and the deposit moves to another trip within a year. Inside 21 days we keep the deposit, because the lodge beds and the car are already committed. If the weather ruins the walk we will offer you another set of dates rather than pretend it did not.

Ordinary travel insurance is enough here. You do not need the high-altitude helicopter cover our other treks demand, because there is a road at both ends and a hospital an hour away. Check that hill walking below 3,000 m is not excluded and that is the whole job.